This month’s Regional Snapshot picks up where the July Regional Snapshot on Affordable Housing left off. In the October Regional Snapshot we take a deeper dive into affordable housing data, mapping it onto our region’s employment centers in an effort to visualize the relationship between housing affordability and concentrations of regional employment.
ARC’s Employment Centers correspond to the Regional Centers identified in the United Growth Policy Map of the Atlanta’s Region Plan. Regional Centers have (on average) 10,000 jobs or more in an area of 3.25 square miles. As a group, they contain 21 percent of the 29-county metro’s jobs in just 0.7 percent of the area. However, as this month’s Regional Snapshot shows, in most cases, these centers have a jobs-housing imbalance.
Highlights from this snapshot:
- There is a spatial mismatch of jobs and housing in the metro region.
- Looking at employment centers is a good way to explore this mismatch.
- Relatively few people live in most of the employment centers, and those that do don’t tend to work in those same centers.
- For those that do reside in the centers (owners and renters), housing takes larger shares of income than for the average metro resident.
- Focusing on recent multifamily data, few affordable units (and very few newer ones) are found in the employment centers, making it difficult for workers (especially low-income workers) to live close to where they work.
Click through the slides below or download the PDF Regional Snapshot: ARC Employment Centers: Core Locations for Jobs, not for Affordable Housing